I’m sitting here at my desk, eating the most delicious pumpkin soup. It may just be the best I have ever made, which is ironic considering I made it without really paying much attention. It seems a bit silly to be posting a recipe for something so simple, but sometimes simple is just what you need.

1kg organic jap pumpkin

1 tablespoon olive oil

4 cloves organic garlic, finely chopped

1 large organic onion, diced

1 litre chicken stock or water (I use my homemade stock, this blog post by Michael Ruhlman perfectly describes why you should too)

1 cup water

200 grams sour cream

1/2 bunch organic kale (about 300 grams)

salt and pepper, to taste

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Cut your pumpkin into fairly large sized chunks, leaving the skin intact. Discard seeds. Place on a roasting tray and cook in a hot oven until you can easily slide a knife into the flesh, about 30 mintues. You want the pumpkin to be soft before it goes into the soup, so be sure to check that it’s completely cooked before you remove it from the oven. Remove the tray from the oven and leave the pumpkin to cool down to room temperature.

Heat the olive oil over a medium heat in a large stock pot. Add the onion and cook slowly until the onion is nicely caramelised, about 10 minutes.

While the onions are sweating remove the skin from the flesh of the pumpkin. If the pumpkin is cooked properly the skin will peel off very easily.

Once the onions are cooked add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds, then add the pumpkin and chicken stock and/or water. Bring this to the boil and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionaly.

Wash the kate well in a bowl of water. Separate the leaves from the stems. Discard the stems. Place a frying pan over a medium heat and fill with the kale. Put a lid on the pan, if you have one, and wilt the kale for three minutes, turning every so often so the kale cooks evenly. Remove from the frying pan to a chopping board and leave to cool completely.

Remove the soup from the heat and stir through the sour cream. Grind over some pepper and add 1 teaspoon salt. Use an immersion/stick blender to blitz the soup until smooth.

My gorgeous friend Josephine made this crochet kitty for me for my birthday. I love him! He looks like quite the beatnik, don’t you think?

The details are amazing – he’s even got little toes and thumbs! Josephine visited me earlier in the year and was just learning to crochet, and within a few months she’s produced this beauty! He’s resting on a Heather Bailey handbag pattern Josephine also sent to me. Talk about spolit! I may just make the handbag this afternoon :)

I snapped up some bargain strawberries at the supermarket yesterday. They were perfectly ripe, so i decided to make them into jam.

I checked out my trusty old copy of the Edmonds Cookbook to see what they said about the ratio of sugar to fruit. Usually I work on a 1:1 ratio, but this time I used 1.140 kgs of strawberries to 1kg of sugar. The instructions on how to actually make the jam cracked me up – such matter of fact language. I especially like the sentence “The juice of 1 or 2 lemons added just before taking jam off element is an improvement.” It sounds like this particular author didn’t really care for strawberry jam very much at all!

When I took my jam jars out of the cupboard and the very first one that I took out of the box just happened to be an old Strawberry Jam jar from last year. It was meant to be.

I love this old preserving pan! It’s almost identical to the one that Mum uses, I have so many childhood memories of a pot of marmalade bubbling away on the stovetop. My sister actually found this one for me through her work – and I brought it to Australia with me.

And these are the lovely jars of ruby coloured jam. I can’t wait to pop open one of these to go with some homemade bread and butter later in the year. Yum!